When creating Long Story Short, Bob-Waksberg found himself asking, “What do I feel like I can’t help but pass on to my children?” Courtesy of Netflix In Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s eyes, creatives have only just scratched the surface of what types of stories can be told in the animated television space.
As the creator of the adult tragicomedy BoJack Horseman, Bob-Waksberg’s no stranger to subverting expectations when it comes to animation and humor. Since the critically acclaimed show ended in 2020, the writer and comedian has experienced some major life changes — chief among them becoming a father of two — that, at least partly, influenced his latest Netflix offering, Long Story Short.
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“I find myself thinking about family a lot more than I was when I was making BoJack Horseman and thinking a lot about what I received from my parents and what I want to pass on to my children — what do I feel like I can’t help but pass on to my children?” Bob-Waksberg tells THR.
Rather than simply opine, the showrunner opted to make “something productive” of his ponderings, infusing them into the series, which centers on a middle-class Jewish family: the Schwooper siblings and their parents, social worker Naomi Schwartz (voiced by Lisa Edelstein) and math professor Elliot Cooper (Paul Reiser), who combined their last names to create the children’s unique surname. Ben Feldman voices the eldest son, Avi; Abbi Jacobson plays the middle child, Shira; and Max Greenfield is the voice of the youngest of the bunch, Yoshi.
“I’m never aware of just how personal I’m being with any of my writing, so I have no idea what this says about me specifically or personally,” says Bob-Waksberg, “but I was very much interested in a long history of family and what it does to a person.”
In a way that a live-action series wouldn’t be able to, Long Story Short employs nonlinear storytelling to explore the way a family’s relationship changes over time — the use of animation eliminating any potential issues with continuity. “We could be very specific with our visuals and have characters age and de-age without having to worry about whether prosthetics look fake,” explains Bob-Waksberg. “We don’t have to have a home base that we’re flashing back or flashing forward from. It feels more like the characters are just the characters. They’re not an actor aging themselves up or aging themselves down.”
As such, the show covers several different eras in each episode — often the ’90s, 2010s and 2020s — even going as far back as the 1950s to uncover overbearing matriarch Naomi’s self-centered origins as a child. In addition to visual freedom, jumping through time allowed the writers to tackle weightier topics like grief, for example. In episode four, “Shira Can’t Cook,” the Schwoopers’ daughter attempts to make knishes like her mom used to for a school potluck, her struggle in the kitchen exemplifying a deep-seated, ongoing need to gain her mother’s approval even after her death in 2020 from COVID-19 — something Shira resented when Naomi was alive.
“Part of [exploring the long history of a family] is also the shared trauma — and the trauma from multiple perspectives — of what being in this family has done to you,” says Bob-Waksberg.
Still, comedy remains at the forefront of the 25-minute episodes, like in “The Intervention,” when Yoshi’s family confronts him about his secretive behavior, believing he’s addicted to drugs when in reality he’s hiding his conversion to Orthodox Judaism from his conservative Jewish family.
“It was very important to me that the show makes sense all the way through, that we’re not building a mystery puzzle box show or putting in little clues that you wouldn’t really understand until you got to the end,” Bob-Waksberg explains of his approach. “I find, especially in comedy, it can be very frustrating if you feel like you’re only getting half the joke or you’re getting a punchline that’s not going to be funny until you hear the setup five episodes later.”
The writers were especially careful when it came to any references to aspects of Jewish identity and customs, making sure the jokes would pay off for the average viewer “even if you don’t know some of the words that are being said because a bunch of it’s cultural, it’s Jewish or it’s Yiddish and it’s never explained,” he adds.
Long Story Short’s specific narrative lens aside, Bob-Waksberg, who also co-created the animated Amazon Prime Video psychological series Undone with Kate Purdy and was an executive producer and writer on the Netflix/Adult Swim animated sitcom Tuca & Bertie, says, “I don’t consider the stuff I do to be niche or cult or inaccessible.”
In fact, when he thinks back to watching episodes of The Simpsons that referenced classic films like Citizen Kane, The Godfather and other pop culture moments he wasn’t fully aware of at a young age, Bob-Waksberg says a certain level of unawareness with a show’s subject matter only enhances engagement. “It made me want to look into those things and learn more about it. I felt more cultured by watching it,” he says. “There’s something kind of nice about being a little kid and sitting on the stairwell and hearing the grown-up party.”
This story appeared in the June 3 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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